A family festival took place on May 5th at Sudlersville Elementary School in the cafeteria/gym for Sudlersville Elementary and Middle School’s Project A to Z after school students in grades 2-8, their parents and siblings. The “Ticket to Your Future” Festival was a celebration of student accomplishments in the Spring 2011 Session of the after school program and an informational event for school/career planning. Attendance for the event was 151 (adults and children).
PFY program director, Kim Umberger provided an overview of the evening activities and fun facts about careers presented. Next, five guest speakers each spoke for approximately 3 minutes about their careers, followed by the QACHS guidance counselor who talked about how students can start preparing for high school entrance and the process of selecting clusters. The final speaker, from Chesapeake College, explained the elements of a strong college application and which skills students can work on now in preparation.
After the presentations, families moved through fun food, displays and interactive stations. They enjoyed seeing their children’s work from the after school program activities, interacted with the instructors and played “carnival” games based on planning/career subjects to illustrate how they should not leave their futures to luck.
The stations were Earning Character hosted by Jacki Carter, QAC Character Counts! Coordinator, emphasized employable character traits with an activity to help self assess skills; Wheel of Chance where attendees took a chance with the spin of a carnival wheel marked with positive goals and negative consequences and prizes; Show Me the Money offered students, along with their parents, an opportunity to make lifestyle choices, calculate the annual salary needed to support their choices and finally, compare their results with annual salaries of 800 careers to see all the possibilities for their future; What’s Right for You? where students looked at careers categorized by subject and placed a “Like” sticker beside the one most interesting; The Guessing Game strictly for PFY students to guess how many M&M’s and what the dollar sum of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies were in each jar. The PFY student with the closest guess for each jar won the contents and learned how just a little bit of change really adds up!
“The goals of the evening were to inspire students to begin planning for their futures, inform parents of some of the expectations for high school and college, and convey the message that they should not plan on luck,” said Program Director, Kim Umberger.
Project A to Z is funded by a 21st Century Community Learning Center grant issued through the Maryland State Department of Education to the Board of Education of Queen Anne’s County and implemented by the Partnering for Youth After School Program. The program will continue through June 2013 at Sudlersville Elementary and Middle Schools.